U.S. Government Starts New Round of ‘Pirate’ Domain Seizures
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
See this opinion: http://www.copyhype.com/2011/03/ice-seizures-criticism-magic...
Senators were calling for more information on their activity at the end of last year but I don't remember hearing much more on it.
The interesting part is where international laws come into play. The issue really hasn't been resolved, but in the mean time, domains continue to be seized.
And they have been making lots of mistakes like when they took a dynamic dns's server mooo.com and it's 84,000 subdomains for one account's alleged actions. See: http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/vulnerabilities...
What they are doing is twisting an existing law on the books to apply to domains and playing cowboy off tips by the MPAA and RIAA. Domains getting taken away without notice or due process. It makes me sick.
Surly, I thought, only bad people like drug dealers would have their mansions confiscated. Shame on me.
[1] http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket
It's sorta like saving electricity. We're mostly pretty inefficient so it's easy to make instant savings. For example switching from incandescent light bulbs, putting in geyser blankets, and so on, are all implemented easily, cheaply, and have an instant material effect. But it's a one time saving. It delays the inevitable, it bys time, but it doesn't solve the root problem.
In the same way fiddling with root dns servers is easy, quick, and (temporarily) effective. It's a one-time solution though. If this carries on then people will simply work around the problem. We're already seeing alternative root dns servers, alternative top level (non-US) domains and so on. If the govt. want to waste their effectiveness on such mundane things as movies and music, then so be it. But every time they do it they just encourage more and more people to work around the problem. And the solution is likely to be (already is) more resistant to this form of explicit interference.
The Internet is a genie not going back into the bottle. It is not something that can be controlled, censored, or governed in the traditional sense. As music and movie executives come to terms with what the digital part of 'Digital Revolution' really means, the govt is starting to learn what the real meaning of Revolution is.
The times they are a changin' (again).
It's only a matter of time before the governments will mandate (by law) that every router should have a way to block certain IPs and MACs, and also offer a backdoor for government agencies to configure the router; hardware which cannot comply with this will be outlawed and illegal to operate.
With that in place, government agencies can block any IP or MAC they want, without having to deal with DNS.
DNS is the most vulnerable part of the stack simply because its the one thing in the stack that is centralized (loosely speaking).
Or do you mean going through a VPN of some kind?
the VPN of some kind is the easy way to do it, yes. Setting up a new VPN provider is pretty trivial. I could do so tomorrow; all I'd need is one of those visa prepaid cards to do so anonymously.
But the point is that yeah, sure, the government could mandate that we block certain IPs but it would be difficult for the government to do and fairly easy for targets to get around - going after the centralized naming resources is going to be much easier, and is going to produce much less resistance.
It's true that there have been alternate dns root servers for some time now; it's not a technically difficult thing to set up. But it is a huge problem of trust. It's very difficult to design a system that is resistant to governmental pressure but is still trustworthy enough that when I type in a site name I can be fairly certain I'm getting the IP address for that site and not a pretender.
.bit is not available over the official root servers, to access .bit names you can:
1) Locally install a resolver for .bit 2) Use one of the nameservers on http://dot-bit.org/HowToBrowseBitDomains instead of your provider's nameserver 3) Use a domain that mirror's the .bit hierachy to resolve names, such as bitname.org
The nice thing about .bit is that there is no central authority, but at the same time the ownership of names is clearly defined.
.bit is different from popular domain registries in that your users actually use it. Also, it's hardly a new idea. if you want to host a web site that can't be shut down, I'd go with a Tor hidden service: https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-hidden-service.html.en
My prediction: if there are no serious challenges to this, then the pace will pick up and they'll start going after higher profile sites, like TPB.
Most confiscated domains have registered with GoDaddy.
what about .me domains, .to , .in domains - i have heard that .me domain is also regulated from the US although it is a Montenegro domain
I do not know what happens when multiple registrars update the TLDs with conflicting information? Is that allowed? Can ICANN intervene and force a TLD update, bypassing a registrar?
The way it works is that registrars for .COM and .NET work with Verisign who runs on the root name servers for those TLDs. It used to be Internic which was operated by Network Solutions, which was bought by Verisign but then NS was later spun back off, but Verisign kept the root name servers. .ORG was given to another organization at some point to manage.
In these cases they are going after the registry itself (Verisign) which is completely under US law and the individual registrars have no involvement whatsoever.
You could also try .de - Germany has pretty good protection against arbitary government intervention these days.
Once upon a time I would have suggested France, but it appears that while they don't have much respect for the United States they do love the copyright companies.
China maybe?
It's a mistery why, but if they did it once they can do it again.
I won't trust Germany resisting huge amounts of external pressure, and I won't trust China, period. So it's inherently a gamble.